Search form

Poem: “Peace” by Robert Graves

A new cartoon by Ralph Steadman, a joint commission by 14-18 Now and the Cartoon Museum to commemorate the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. The cartoon is part of the exhbition 1914 Day By Day Cartoons at the Cartoon Museum, London WC1, until 19 October

Peace

When that glad day shall break to match

“Before-the-War” with “Since-the-Peace”,

And up I climb to twist new thatch

Across my cottage roof, while geese

Stand stiffly there below and vex

The yard with hissing from long necks,

In that immense release,

That shining day, shall we hear said:

“New wars to-morrow, more men dead”?

When peace time comes and horror’s over,

Despair and darkness like a dream,

When fields are ripe with corn and clover,

The cool white dairy full of cream,

Shall we work happily in the sun,

And think “It’s over now and done”,

Or suddenly shall we seem

To watch a second bristling shadow

Of armed men move across the meadow?

Will it be over once for all,

With no more killed and no more maimed;

Shall we be safe from terror’s thrall,

The eagle caged, the lion tamed;

Or will the young of that vile brood,

The young ones also, suck up blood

Unconquered, unashamed,

Rising again with lust and thirst?

Better we all had died at first,

Better that killed before our prime

We rotted deep in earthy slime.

This poem first appeared in the New Statesman of 21 September 1918. Graves, who survived the First World War despite serious injury in the Battle of the Somme, contributed to the NS from 1918 to 1975.

It sounded like the densest of abridgements: five days of excerpts from Reality Is Not What It Seems: the Journey to Quantum Gravity by the Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli (week beginning 28 November, 9.45am). Swarms of quantum events where time does not exist. Cosmology, meteorology and cathedrals of atomism. Leucippus of Miletus and lines of force filling space. Very few of us listening could have understood what was being said. Instead, we just allowed it to wash over, reminding us that there are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio.

Perhaps once or twice, as the week progressed, token attempts were made to check that everybody was keeping up (“So, the number of nanoseconds in a second is the same as the number of seconds in 30 years”) – or to encourage listeners to picture themselves as part of an experiment (“Imagine I’m on Mars, and you were here . . .”). But generally it was utterly airtight, the reader, Mark Meadows, doing a good job of keeping his voice at a pace and tone uncondescendingly brisk, flattering us that nobody was scratching their head (“The speed of light determined by Maxwell’s equations is velocity with respect to what?”).

It was my favourite radio book reading of 2016. Not because I learned a single thing I could repeat, or might realistically mull over, but because it sounded like a brief return to something that has declined so much over our lifetimes – knowledge as part of a function of a media flow.

It’s that old idea that something might be there for your betterment. When we were exposed to just four channels on television especially, and forced to stay on them, we got into astronomy and opera and all sorts of stuff, almost against our will. (Rigoletto? Jesus. Well, there’s nothing else on . . .) The programme was marvellously and unapologetically impenetrable, as the days and chapters piled up relentlessly (“We are immersed in a gigantic flexible snail shell”). What this adaptation comprehended was that we don’t actually want someone explaining Einstein to us. What is much more compelling – more accurate and clever – is simply to show what it’s like in other people’s brains.

Antonia Quirke is an author and journalist. She is a presenter on The Film Programme and Pick of the Week (Radio 4) and Film 2015 and The One Show (BBC 1). She writes a column on radio for the New Statesman.